Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week.

If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.

Spent a few days auditing graphics drivers: i915, nouveau, nvidia-390, nvidia-340 to examine their advertised vs working vsync features. Because confusion between what is advertised and what actually works was holding up progress in !73, !191 and !334.

FYI, some generally exciting news: Upstream some people have tracked down two causes of disk IO impacting graphics smoothness. Something I knew was a problem but had never investigated yet. It’s encouraging there are fixes proposed already (1, 2).

PR #6258 is still progressing. There is still some work to be done on the tests and I need to get it reviewed.

Under testing, I discovered that directly activated (as opposed to systemd activated) system bus services were failing. As Ubuntu 14.04 doesn’t support systemd activation, it basically meant system bus service activation didn’t work at all there. Further more, changing things to work with 14.04 would make supporting Ubuntu Core systems more difficult. I’m following up with the snapd guys to decide how to proceed.

With bus activated services the most appropriate systemd service type is dbus, where the service is considered started when a given bus name is claimed. Snapd can generate unit files of this type, but Snapcraft and review-tools both consider it a syntax error. I started a thread to see what we can do about this. On the bright side, the fact you can’t currently publish a snap using daemon: dbus means we’re free to change the behaviour if appropriate.